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Comment by KLexpat | Hacker News Reader

Do you think this could effectively render vaccines completely useless, if they have novel spike proteins that aren't targeted by the vaccines?

Please forgive me if this is a stupid question, this is not my knowledge domain.

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That’s the doomsday scenario and thankfully “completely useless” is quite unlikely. However all viruses mutate and so it’s only a matter of time before the current vaccines become gradually less effective. We give people 3-4 new vaccines a year (usually in one “flu shot”) in the never ending battle against the mutating influenza virus. So it’s really important we get as many people vaccinated ASAP. Every new person infected makes millions upon millions of copies of the virus, each one being a new opportunity for mutations to develop. Stopping infections exponentially slows down the rate at which the virus can mutate simply because it’s being “photocopied” fewer and fewer times.

No, looks like it is easy to modify existing mRNA vaccines slightly and give booster shots

>“Every time a new variant comes up we should be able to test whether or not [our vaccine] is effective,” Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla told Bloomberg news. “Once we discover something that is not as effective, we will very, very quickly be able to produce a booster dose that will be a small variation to the current vaccine.”

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.timesofisrael.com/pfizer-mo...

I remember reading somewhere a claim that the initial development of the (a?) mRNA vaccine was basically over a weekend; the testing and scaling to manufacture took the rest of the time.

True; it was ready in January. Proving it is safe definitely takes times.

> By the time the first American death was announced a month later, the vaccine had already been manufactured and shipped to the National Institutes of Health for the beginning of its Phase I clinical trial.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/12/moderna-covid-19-vac...

A big part of the safety concerns were about the lipid layer outside the mRNA triggering autoimmune reaction, which doesn't need to change, so changing only the mRNA data should be relatively safe.

You then have to manufacture enough doses and distribute them. It's still a nightmare.

Tack-on question: Even if a mutation can (re)infect people who have been vaccinated or previously had COVID, can we assume their immune response would at least be improved?

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